Coming from the UK we are naturally or maybe trained to be nostalgic about all things….from places we visited as a child, to meals our mother used to make, but for those of us that drive I would like to bet that the majority of us feel some affection for our first car.

This is not something that our friends here in Bulgaria are big on and I’m not sure if this is sad or not. Having lived here for a number of years we see the old villages starting to empty as the older generation pass away and the younger generation make the move to the bright lights of the city for university, friends and careers.

This is sad because there are many houses left uncared for, but also great for us foreigners looking to change our way of life as there are still many bargains to be had.

It was one such Brit (Neil Penn), driven by a desire to remove himself from the rat-race and somewhat genetically programmed to be nostalgic, that had the unique idea of establishing a way that western travellers could explore eastern Europe in the most unforgettable manner.

It was this one man’s vision that was the catalyst for the creation of Classic Car Holidays, who offer the opportunity to see the Balkans… all from behind the wheel of a Trabant. Really this is a thing! Check it out here www.classiccarholidays.co.uk

So when my friend that works in PR and Marketing in Motorsport came to visit, it was an event not to be missed. We booked a ‘Try a Trabie’ with Neil and abandoned our modern hire car in favour of something very different.

Travelling at a slower pace, but with a certain amount of zip, Neil was great at demonstrating the foibles of the old East German built machine. With column gear changes and offset pedals it was an experience that not many have had and we will certainly not forget.

The Bulgarian countryside is something to be treasured and too many of us (myself included) miss things as we whizz by so busy with our lives. To really benefit from this experience you have to change your perception of what travel is about.

Touring the Balkans is just as much about the journey as the destination and with two clients that have a racing past it was definitely a challenge not to accelerate out of the corners and down the straights, moving up the gears in quick succession, but to relax, put your arm on the window, look at your surroundings and let the engine take you to your next pit stop.

Our little car was ‘Colonel Mustard’, one of eight cars run by CCH and in true nostalgic style, Neil told stories about how these cars were owned by doctors and the like to service the community and as we pootled around the lanes we learnt a whole new respect for this little car and a whole new way to time travel.

If anyone out there has visiting Bulgaria, Romania or Macedonia on their bucket list then you really should come and try this, and if you have never thought of visiting then think again…even if it is just to drive this iconic piece of history and be surprised at what else these countries have to offer.

No this is not the story of what we did with all that turkey post Christmas, or about me stopping class A drugs, but rather about my radical decision to spend an entire week without going on Facebook. If anyone had asked me, prior to this experiment, what that would be like, I’d have shrugged my shoulders and said ‘no issues, I don’t spend that much time on there anyway’.

Well that is not quite true! By not going on Facebook this week I have noticed a couple of things:
1. Just how much time I actually spent on there and
2. Just how hard it would be not to…

I documented each day to understand how this affected me and so I would realise just how much of an addiction this had become, this is the story of my week living outside of social media.

Day 1

My old routine of logging into the ‘world’ first thing in a morning became blatantly obvious as I switched between pacing the floor and staring blankly at the Google search bar wondering what else this amazing internet could offer to pass my time. I was inexplicably attracted to the weather forecast although I could plainly see that it was snowing even though according to Accuweather it wasn’t. For some reason I get an insane pleasure from trying to catch it out, although if I’m honest it is rarely right so it is not really much of a challenge.

Time for another coffee….Dan surfaces and begins the day by informing me what is going on on Facebook which kind of defeats the object, so I have to ask him to stop and I go to water my plants, something I haven’t done in weeks and it shows…woops.

Then I remembered why I was doing this in the first place…to get this wasted time back. So I turned to my list, and began emptying my kitchen cupboards, which meant I felt obliged then to clean inside them (another thing I discovered I had not done for sometime…if ever), and removed them from the wall in order install my new splash-back. For those of you in Facebook world this was ‘Tick 6’ and I think it looks pretty funky and such a cheap method of tidying up the area.

As luck would have it this job didn’t take as long as I thought so I was soon back to twiddling my thumbs in front of the laptop. What on earth did I do before Facebook? I took the opportunity to clean up my formulas in my teaching tracker, something I’d been meaning to do for 6 months at least. I emailed a few friends to touch base as I felt unusually disconnected.

It felt strange today, I had to physically stop myself from just checking in … but I didn’t and I didn’t cease to exist because of it….although part of me feels like I did, maybe because I know that others are swapping stories and pictures of their day whilst I just did my stuff and nobody knows what….a strangely disconcerting concept – maybe tomorrow will feel better.

Day 2

Despite my best efforts, today was just ‘one of those days’ when I just had to login. My friend and neighbour, Shirley, passed away yesterday in France and I had to let people in the village know. For all it’s faults, Facebook is great for getting messages to people quickly. This was such a sad event, but I was comforted by her messages the previous week. I had re-homed her beloved cat for her, for which she was so grateful and I had agreed to scatter her ashes according to her wishes, she was then happy that everything was in place to allow her to pass peacefully. So that is what we must do, so having passed on the information I withdrew once again from Facebook.

Being away from the medium of Messenger meant I had to actually gather some stuff together to help out my friend who had not been feeling too great but was finally up for some company, so I walked across the village in the snow carrying a heater and a silicon gun. It was lovely, fresh falling snow, the silence you only get when it is actually snowing and that special tinge of light in the sky, a kind of pink that says…there is more on its way.

On my return I felt pumped, determined and decided it was time to stop being a wuss and brave the camper to remove the wasps nests. Of course they are all dead at this time of year but it didn’t stop my heart from beating at twice the normal rate during the operation of unscrewing vent covers to pick out the nests, bag them and remove them from site…but I did it so this is ‘Tick 7’.

Day 3

So many nice snow pictures and I can’t do anything with them, I guess it is time to mention I dropped my smartphone down the toilet so I don’t even have any instagram…aggghhh…the urge to tell everyone about it is immense, but why, does anyone even care…are my pictures any better than anyone elses? Of course not, they are better to me because they show my life, my village, my dogs, my views and I’ve already seen them so why such a desire to share them? I can’t answer this but I do know that making these notes helped to stiffen my resolve.

It also helped that due to very low temperatures last night our water pipes froze (I forgot to leave the tap dripping overnight) and so I never really noticed the lack of Facebook as we were too busy defrosting snow in the kettle, hanging up a bottle of spring water to de-ice because we’d left it in the car, stocking up the wood piles and topping up fresh bottles from the spring.

This may seem like lots of hard work but it was a gorgeous day – beautiful scenery and we got dragged in by our neighbours for food and beer…my face was still glowing hours later as their house was so hot.

Then it was off to visit my Russian neighbours before they departed on holiday….how did I ever have time for Facebook LOL (that LOL was deliberate by the way…just to show I miss it just a little).

Got some more stuff done that was long overdue – logged all future booked work in the van and sorted out my password list. I felt much more in control …oh and ‘Tick 8’ today as the picture finally went up in the lounge.

Day 4

Sitting for three hours in a freezing office to try and resolve some classroom issues with technical support (based in Thailand so considerably more comfortable) tends to take your mind off social media…currently -15C outside and not many degrees warmer in the office space.

Cold water has finally come back as Dan spent about the same amount of time with a heat gun on the pipes in our small bathroom…still no hot water yet so I still smell…and somehow I managed to trap a nerve in my shoulder whilst sleeping, so took some time out to sit and watch some crap TV – and organize these notes. We are now watching Designated Survivor and so far so good.

I had a lesson with a regular student early this evening so I lit the fire up there so I didn’t suffer for another hour. My desire for a bath right now far outweighs my desire to log on to Facebook…it is all about priorities.

Day 5

What should have been a nice day in Vt with my long suffering friend turned into me being held hostage in Technomarket (the Bulgarian equivalent to Curries) for nearly an hour while they decided whether to give me a refund on a set of headphones I had purchased. Eventually I got a considered and ‘polite’ decision of ‘voucher or nothing’…I took the voucher and then proceeded to just miss my friend in every shop we went to, until it was time to come home.

I do now have a new phone though, so lets see how long I can keep this one alive.

We still have no hot water, yet temperatures have been well above freezing today with bags of sunshine and melting snow, frustrating!

Dan has changed the diff on his BMW back to the welded variety and I have acquired a new clutch for Brian (my lada) so at some point I may well be mobile again.

Friday the 13th pfft…

Day 6

I had an early night last night to try and be fresh for today’s teaching…however my hot water had other ideas. At 4am the bath suddenly spurted into life as I’d left the tap open in a desperate bid to try and convince it to give me some water…then of course my ‘worry-brain’ kicked in and I had to throw on a sexy pair of wellies and a coat and check out the other taps downstairs just in case we had left these running too….we hadn’t, but that was the end of sleep for me so lit the fires and got myself a coffee and made some notes in preparation for today’s lessons.

I got two pieces of good news today, I got a Christmas card from my best friend in the UK who plainly needs to organise herself a bit better and my sister finally got connected to Whatsapp – this will change my life. Currently I ring her weekly standing up the hill in all weathers as we don’t have signal at home and she was still living in 1976. Now I can call her and stay warm….the best present yet.

This ironically got me thinking about a post I saw on Facebook a little while ago, in the run up to the new year, where the suggestion was to take a jar and put a note in of any good things that happen. Then at the end of the year, no matter how hard it has been, you can empty the jar and remember the good times.

So I took a note of all the good things that happened this week and got to 11 before I stopped noting them down…I think I’m going to need a bigger jar…unless that is we can remove one every time something goes a little awry….it turns out the microphone on my new phone doesn’t want to work in Whatsapp so it looks like I’ll be back to freezing my extremities off in the snow. I will try again tomorrow.

Day 7

Right this is my final day away from Facebook and to be honest the weekends are not usually such an issue as I work anyway and only rarely would have time to check in ….today I won’t be checking in, but I am strangely excited about getting back out into the cyber world of my friends and acquaintances across the globe, but also there is a weird sense of dread. Not because of what I have missed as I’m sure I’ll soon catch up on that, but of what people will think of me.

Do they think I have been rude for not responding to their messages, has anyone ‘unfriended’ me, or spoken ill of me, well I guess only time will tell and as I sit here in the real world I am unaware of any of these things, they are not affecting my life now, so why should they be allowed to influence my life once I return to Facebook.

Maybe I will be pleasantly surprised.
Maybe ignorance is bliss.
Maybe I will care slightly less.